The Fairphone 3 is a smartphone manufactured using ethically-sourced materials when possible and designed to be repairable – the phone’s maker sells replacement parts and even a camera upgrade module that essentially turns the phone into a Fairphone 3+. While the Fairphone 3 ships with Android software, the bootloader is unlockable and you can install […]
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Roundup: Librem 5, Precursor, Fedora, Gentoo, Nemo Mobile, and GNOME 40
Developer Martign Braam, who created the Megapixels camera app and many other Linux apps for the PinePhone, PineTab, and other mobile Linux devices, recently wrote an article asking whether folks who are buying Linux phones really want Linux phones. As I’ve mentioned, folks who are looking for an Android or iOS-like experience with access to […]
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Disk encryption, GPS, new apps and settings coming to the Librem 5 with PureOS
Purism’s Librem 5 smartphone ships with a custom GNU/Linux distribution called PureOS. It’s the same software that runs on Purism’s Linux laptops, but it’s been adapted to work with phones like the Librem 5. So far there are some key features that haven’t worked yet. Now Purism is announcing it’ll enable some of those things […]
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PinePhone Beta Edition goes up for pre-order
After shipping tens of thousands of PinePhone Community Edition smartphones to enthusiasts, the folks at Pine64 ended the Community Edition program recently. Now you can buy a PinePhone Beta Edition, which will ship with Manjaro Linux and the KDE Plasma user interface pre-installed. It’s called Beta because the software is still a work in progress. […]
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Pangolin Mobile is a new open source user interface for smartphones
Most Linux distributions designed to run on smartphones use the Phosh, Plasma Mobile, or Lomiri user interfaces, although there are a few other options… and now there’s one more. Pangolin Mobile is an open source mobile shell designed for dahliaOS, a dual-kernel operating that’s intended to combine “the best of GNU/Linux and Fuchsia OS,” with […]
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Ubuntu Touch OTA-16 released with improved browser, video recording, Android app support and more
The latest update to the Ubuntu Touch operating system for smartphones and tablets is here, and it’s a big update, with changes to more than a third of all binary packages in the operating system. With official releases available for 26 different phones and tablets, Ubuntu Touch OTA-16 includes a number of updates to core features of […]
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Now you can make video calls on a PinePhone (but it’s very much a work in progress)
When the PinePhone began shipping to early adopters, it had all the hardware you’d expect from a smartphone, but it lacked the software needed to make some of that hardware work. If you were one of the first people to get your hands on a PinePhone, you had a Linux-friendly phone with a camera that […]
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Plasma Mobile updates make the user interface more customizable (and a bit more Android-like)
There are several different user interfaces available for Linux smartphones, but the one that will probably feel the most familiar to Android users is KDE’s Plasma Mobile. Like Android, it has a home screen, an app drawer, navigation buttons on the bottom, status notifications at the top, and a quick settings panel that appears when […]
